End state capitalism, the coportocracy / oligarchy using the legal system they control to wield the fascist police forces against the people who don’t behave like they’re told. Meanwhile, taxing what little those people have to pay the salaries of those forces abusing them.
I mean, the studios are doing it right and following SOP.
They wrote the DCMA, used the congress they bought to pass it, the president the bought to sign it into law, and now will use the FBI and local militarized police to impose their will by force.
Constituon was an obstacle they did away with when they bought the Supreme Court.
I for one want to be in compliance. Here is my IP, I checked it in Microsoft windows so it is correct. 192.168.0.1
Text me at that IP if I need to pay a fine or if I need to go to my local jail. Thanks guys, I’m sorry I pirated and I will re upload all the movie films that I downloaded to try to make this right.
They are going about it the wrong way with reddit. All they gotta do is show the $$$$ and spez will bend right over with that information. After all that’s all he seems to see.
Literally illegal. Discussing crimes doesn’t equal crime, so there’s no reason for them to requeust IPs. And at least in the EU you aren’t even allowed to disclose information related to your person.
Well in theory you are right. And if you have evidence like in the case of the 2pac murder (he literally wrote about handing the gun over so they could kill him with it), then sure. But to get a subpoena, and let’s use me as an example, you would need to prove that I talked about specifics on how I would or will pirate a stream, and then you would need to find writing of me saying something to the effect of “I did this yesterday” or “I will do this next week” or something very specific like that.
And this is only to get the information. Then they still need to tie you to it and get enough evidence to start suing, otherwise they might not be able to prove their prima facia case.
I know it’s scary, but the truth is we have laws to protect us from government overreach and at the same time those keep companies in check as well. Let’s not make it more dramatic than it is.
Let’s also acknowledge that conspiracy is easy to say in theory and hard to prove in practice, specifically because you need to make sure you can inextricably link 2 defendant together and they are linked in the context of the same instance of a crime. And at that point no one would waste the resources for such a charge. They would rather chase the piracy websites to shut down a whole network for a bit, that’s more efficient. It’s easier to just serve the server providers a cease and desist and have be over with.
Not unless you talk about how you will commit or have committed a specific instance of piracy. E.g. “I downloaded back to the future last night from (insert website)”. Then they have reasonable suspicion and can start to subpoena.
Obligatory IANAL. Always do research and ask in lawyer if you wanna talk specifics.
“Man, you know how easy it would be to get away with insider trading/misreporting earnings/reselling seized fentanyl/asking for a key piece of evidence to go missing? I have a friend/family member/employee/business contact/perp I let go that owes me a favor.”
They don’t care. It’s the film industry equivalent to the Microsoft support scammers. Get a bunch of targets, spam out hundreds of thousands of threatening emails, profit off the small percent of people who fall for it.
I had a Microsoft support scammer once… I let him in to my system too…well not really.
I quickly spin up a quick fresh install of slack ware Linux in a virtual machine that didn’t even have x11 never mind wine installed. When it was up I told him a friend uses something called tellynet (aka telnet but I was playing dumb) to help me on the computer.
He telnetted in and could not understand why any of his malware wasn’t working…
Yes they do. They are boxed in neatly in the current laws and unless you are discussing specifics about doing a crime in the past or future, they will not get that subpoena and thus they are in a catch 22.
Now if you are actively torrenting, chances are you could run into one of those fake peers that will grab your IP and they can start suing you. But other than that they would need real good evidence to subpoena.
Subpoenas are tools the government uses to compel a private entity to provide information. This isn’t that though, this is one private entity asking another private entity to just give them data. It’s not a legal case, and because of our non-existant privacy regulations in the US, Reddit is free to just hand over this information, or not if they want. No crime has to even be alleged, Reddit can just hand that information out.
Ok yes sorry I should have specified, what you’re saying might apply to the US.
What I said applies to the EU.
Thing is, companies need to know beforehand if they are dealing with a user from US or EU because they don’t wanna break laws when they have to deal with the court system anyway on stuff like this. So technically they could transmit information about US citizens, but in practice this is super tricky and risky.
Let’s say you got an IP. Alright you can pinpoint The location. Problem: you don’t know whether you just grabbed the target IP or an IP from a VPN or a proxy. There’s ways to obscure this so you might not even be able to find out. Now if you turn this over, there’s a small risk you just did a crime because they are spoofing their location. And if you just captured a VPN or proxy, you are now pursuing the wrong person and in EU law this won’t go over well.
So in practice there’s basically no way to do this and be sure you didn’t make a mistake, and mistakes in law are risky and costly. No company would ever take such a risk.
Now I could go into detail about all the technical details on why things work like that but it would make this twice as long.
TL;DR in theory you are right for US users, in practice there’s no way to tell and it gets risky pretty fast.
Also obligatory IANAL and always check in with a lawyer if you need specific legal advice.
That’s a really interesting point, has it been tested in court? The article is about US companies and US websites so I figured EU law was irrelevant, but I am curious to see if the EU can claim jurisdiction for actions foreign companies take outside the EU, regardless of if they have any official EU presence.
Well I can not give you a specific case for that, but it widely accepted that online actions against users from the EU that violate laws in the EU can get persued.
Do you remember seeing some US websites saying “we don’t service EU users at the moment”? That’s because they didn’t want to get a lawyer so they can comply with the EU GDPR back then. I assume this is because they knew there was some precedent.
If you are keen on it I can go digging for case law though.
Note that one of the headings literally says “Why US companies must comply with the GDPR” and the answer is “because it is extra-territorial in scope”.
On that page you linked, they say “So far, the EU’s reach has not been tested, but no doubt data protection authorities are exploring their options on a case-by-case basis.” So it hasn’t really been tested yet it seems. It’s true that there are extradition treaties and interpol that aid in cross-border prosecution, but that tends to be used primarily when the alleged crime happened in the prosecuting country’s jurisdiction, or the alleged crime is handled similarly in both countries. A GDPR violation by a US company wouldn’t be considered a crime at all in the US, so it’s entirely possible that they might decline to assist in prosecution.
Ok you wound me up now so I had a little scouring of the internet.
Yes, I can not find case law of extradition of US based companies through US entities.
What I can find is a couple of cases against bigger companies that also act in the realm of the EU. Google has been fined in the Netherlands for global violations if I understand correctly. Meta has been fined even a few times for global violations, enforced in Ireland.
So yes, technically enforcement in the US is not guaranteed, but they basically can’t build up their company in the EU anymore unless they deal with it. It’s not perfect, but violations can still suck for business expansion, and that is good. and then I do have to look into the new EU data privacy laws if they changed enforcement or anything else important.
That makes sense. Companies with no presence in the EU can likely skirt the rules, but any large company with an EU presence will be compelled to follow them.
I could give you a full breakdown of how it works in EU, but basically there needs to be indisputable evidence that a crime occured for any party to subpoena any ISP or service provider company. Otherwise those companies will be in huge trouble. The one doing the subpoena because they wouldn’t have an order for that and if they fuck around right before suing, courts will not take kindly to that. And the other receiving the subpoena for disclosing personal information (although they’d maybe win a defense to that, because if they did their due diligence they are not supposed to tank the damages).
What I’m saying is, considering currently laws in the EU, I think we’re good. Of course IANAL so ask one if you need specific advice.
More corporations with zero responsibility and way too much fucking power. We need regulators with teeth and we need to remove the legal hand of business from the pockets of our legislatures. I can’t believe someone actually burned down Studio Ghibli HQ before Citizen’s United was. Wtf.
It was Kyoto Animation that was attacked. They have quite a few similarities in artstyle and themes to Ghibli, and you could maybe call them a spiritual successor. But neither is owned by, or a part of, the other.
Ghibli recently released How Do You Live, probably their last film. With the last surviving founders retiring, Nippon TV will manage the studio and the museum.
Man that place. I know it’s cliche to talk about it like talking about your ex on a date, but I posted there for good reason.
I found the solution to a rare bug that was bothering a group of people. I posted the solution, and my account was immediately banned sitewide for violating the terms of service, whatever that means.
I thought to myself: yeah… it was a mistake coming here. Leave it to the bots to have conversations with themselves.
It was a solution to a Lutris bug. Basically, flatpak containers can use these things called portals to gain access to specific files and directories via a file chooser rather than broad access or manually assigned access.
In this case, my wine installation was crashing because some part of it was trying to obtain a lock on a directory object, which is an unsupported feature when accessing a directory through a portal. The error message is something completely unrelated like can’t draw window with a string of hex values. It took me a few hours to track down the real root cause.
Oh well. Works on my machine. Also, there’s a fix on the development branch now. I made a write-up, posted it, and it’s all gone. I should have known better honestly. It works great for some people but anybody can arbitrarily receive unfair treatment with no recourse at any time. I’m satisfied knowing that eventually the fix will get out to everybody eventually. It’s just a shame I couldn’t leave a signpost behind.
The problem that could occur is: Right now Microsoft doesn’t care about Linux or competitors, every OEM has to buy a Windows key anyways regardless. If SteamOS actually becomes a shippable option, Microsoft’s cavalier attitude is going to change quickly, and a lot sooner than it will take them to get an Xbox Handheld out the door.
I don’t understand how that’s a problem. Can you go into a little bit more detail about what you think the consequences might be to manufacturers choosing to use Steam OS or some other Linux operating system on their handheld devices?
Hasn’t Steam just beat its record of simultaneously online users? And while I’m sure Steam Decks contributed to this, we’re taking of numbers an order of magnitude bigger. Hell, PC gaming is doing so well that we’re seeing until then console exclusive games come out on Steam.
I think the problem is that it’s super popular for those who already own a PC and have a huge Steam Library. I got console friends wanting a Steam Deck but ultimately don’t want to buy one because it means rebuying their games.
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